Epilogue: Adorno, Tragedy and Theatre as Negation

Abstract

Towards the end of his book Participation: Consciousness of Semblance, Alexander García Düttmann addresses the connection between the aesthetic semblance of beauty and the immediacy of the corporeal. Following Adorno, the semblance (Schein) or spirit of art is here characterised as a ‘more’ which aligns art with the concept of natural beauty. Düttmann shows how nature, like art, has the ability to say more than it is, and this more, or semblance, is an expression of the somatic and corporeal. ‘Der Schein ist das, was in der Kunst vom Körper bleibt’ — ‘Semblance is what remains of the body in art’ (Düttmann, Participation 181; translation KG) but this remainder of the body as (and in the form of) aesthetic semblance is foremost, and paradoxically, a negative expression of the non-existent and the inexpressible rather than an affirmative utopian claim to that which does not (yet) exist. If art has the power to rescue the body as semblance, thus releasing physicality from its contingent or literal fate as mere empirical matter, this process is nevertheless only to be conceived as a tension between art’s suggestion of a ‘more’ (an ‘as if’) and the contingency of artistic material. Thus, aesthetic semblance understood as a recollection of immanent corporeality (the body) becomes a marker for non-semblance, without which the work of art would ‘lose itself to the delusion of fantasy’ (Participation 182).

For only what does not fit into this world is true.

(AT 59)